Thursday, February 04, 2010

Katie Couric presented a fair amount of the "Hide the Decline" satire of the work of Penn State's Michael Mann. Although there was the usual professor saying "it's still all right" and labeling of the opposition as skeptics, one saw enough of the video to get the drift.

The subject of the spoof is Michael Mann of Penn State University, who was accused of tampering with climate data to produce his famous hockey stick graph which shows that the rise in man-made greenhouse gasses corresponds to a rise in world temperatures.

An academic board today cleared Mann, saying his science holds up - but the damage may have already been done.

The biggest splash these days in the global warming argument may not be caused by the world's melting glaciers. It may be caused by a series of gaffes by climate change scientists.

Of the "this is a minor problem" tone of the CBS report:

That trust had already been undermined by the series of leaked emails at Britain's University of East Anglia - one of the world's big climate science centers - which seemed to show that inconvenient facts were being hidden.

It's a frustrating time for climate scientists, the vast majority of whom believe that despite what they see as small errors, the basic science of the human role in global warming remains true.

"I am concerned that it appears the whole edifice has been undermined by these couple of bricks that are flaking a bit," said Brian Hoskins a professor at Imperial College London. It's a danger, he said.

Mann is also the creator of the infamous 'hockey stick' graph that showed a huge increase in temperatures, but that was discredited when Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the program that was used by Mann to get the graph.

They found that no matter what data was introduced into the program, the result was always a hockey stick graph, explains Richard Muller from MIT's Technology Review Online in his October 15th, 2004 article "Global Warming Bombshell".Dr. Mann was a leading contributor to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sponsored reports, many of which have come under scrutiny after admissions by the IPCC that some of their climate predictions did not hold any scientific basis to support them.

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I'm a patent lawyer located in central New Jersey. I have a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where I studied graphite intercalation compounds at the Center for Materials Research. I worked at Exxon Corporate Research in areas ranging from engine deposits through coal and petroleum to fullerenes. An article that I wrote in The Trademark Reporter, 1994, 84, 379-407 on color trademarks was cited by Supreme Court in Qualitex v. Jacobson, 514 US 159 (1995) and the methodology was adopted
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